Toothpaste widely contaminated with lead and other metals, US research finds
Most of 51 brands of toothpaste tested for lead contained the dangerous heavy metal, including those for children, or marketed as green. The testing, conducted by the Lead Safe Mama non-profit, also found concerning levels of highly toxic arsenic, mercury and cadmium in many brands.
About 90% of toothpastes contained lead, 65% contained arsenic, just under half contained mercury, and one-third had cadmium. Many brands contain a number of the toxins.
The highest levels detected violate some federal and state limits in the US, though the thresholds have been roundly criticized by public health advocates for not being protective – no level of exposure to lead is safe, the federal government has found.
'It's unconscionable – especially in 2025,' said Tamara Rubin, Lead Safe Mama's founder. 'What's really interesting to me is that no one thought this was a concern.'
Lead can cause cognitive damage to children, harm the kidneys and cause heart disease, among other issues. Lead, mercury, cadmium and arsenic are all carcinogens.
Rubin first learned that lead was added to toothpaste about 12 years ago while working with families that had children with high levels of the metal in their blood. The common denominator among them was a brand of toothpaste, Earthpaste, that contained lead.
Last year she detected high levels in some toothpaste using an XRF lead detection tool. The levels were high enough to raise concern, and she crowdfunded with readers to send popular brands to an independent laboratory for testing.
Among those found to contain the toxins were Crest, Sensodyne, Tom's of Maine, Dr Bronner's, Davids, Dr Jen and others.
So far, none of the companies Lead Safe Mama checked have said they will work to get lead out of their product, Rubin said. Several sent her cease-and-desist letters, which she said she ignored, but also posted on her blog.
Some companies have defended themselves, often claiming that lead is found in trace levels throughout the environment and is impossible to avoid. Others have said the levels Rubin found are not concerning.
The federal Baby Food Safety Act of 2024, which is stalled in Congress, called for lead limits in kids' food or personal care products like toothpaste of five parts per billion (ppb). California's limit on lead in baby food is two ppb, but it does not include toothpaste.
Most toothpastes exceeded those thresholds.
The FDA's current lead limit for children is 10,000 ppb, and 20,000 ppb for adults. None exceeded the FDA limits.
The state of Washington recently enacted a law with 1,000 ppb limits – several exceeded that and have been reported, Rubin said, but companies have time to get in compliance with the new rules.
The FDA did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did Crest's parent company, Procter & Gamble.
Rubin said the contamination seems to lie in some ingredients added to toothpaste, including hydroxyapatite, calcium carbonate and bentonite clay. Hydroxyapatite is extracted from cow bone and added because it allegedly helps teeth absorb calcium, though Rubin said she doubts it does. Calcium carbonate is added to help remove stains from teeth. Bentonite clay is a cleaning agent.
Those with the highest levels all had bentonite clay. Meanwhile, Rubin's testing of hydroxyapatite and calcium carbonate as individual ingredients showed concerning levels of lead and other metals, suggesting those are the source.
Several children's toothpastes, like Dr Brown's Baby Toothpaste, did not test positive for any metals and did not contain the ingredients in question.
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The Make America Healthy Again (Maha) movement celebrated this month after the US dairy industry voluntarily pledged to remove all artificial dyes from ice-cream by 2028. In April, US health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr prevailed upon the food industry to stop using artificial dyes, and many of the nation's largest food manufacturers, including Nestle, Kraft Heinz and PepsiCo, have already promised to comply. But the ice-cream pledge made Kennedy especially happy because, he said, ice-cream is his favorite food. Prepare to say goodbye to the brilliant pink (from red dye No 40) that signifies strawberry, the cool green (yellow 5 and blue 1) of mint chocolate chip, and the heroic combination of red 40, blue 1, and yellow 5 and 6 that makes up Superman. One of the goals of the Maha movement is to prevent childhood diseases, which Kennedy argues can be accomplished by, among other things, addressing the use of additives in ultra-processed foods. 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Switching from artificial to natural dyes is a complex process, says Travis Zissu, the co-founder and innovation lead of Scale Food Labs in Golden, Colorado, which offers a program to help manufacturers with the dye conversion. Unlike artificial dyes, which are derived from petroleum, natural dyes come mostly from plants: turmeric, for example, is used for yellows; algae and butterfly pea flower for blues; lycopene from carrots and tomatoes for reds. These dyes can be less stable, so Scale's program begins with finding natural pigments that will not be affected by heat and other chemicals, followed by tests to determine which combination of dyes will produce the most reliable color. Next, Scale helps companies lock in contracts that will not force them to raise their prices too much and secure light-sensitive packaging to protect the colors. Finally, there are nine to 12 months of product testing to make sure production runs smoothly and that there are no adverse effects for consumers, such as red-dyed feces (something that has been known to happen with beet powder and extract; Alan says it's harmless, but admits it can be unnerving). But Zissu's biggest concern is that there won't be enough to go around. Natural color demand is already up between 30-50% across the industry since food companies began announcing their intentions to stop using artificial color, he says, and the earliest deadline – 2027 – is still years away. 'There is simply not enough supply to replace every single item in the market,' he says. 'You'll see the largest companies locking down colors soon, but there will not be enough until 2030.' There is also the worry that American consumers will reject the new colors altogether. While their counterparts in Europe, Canada and Japan have peacefully accepted the duller hues of natural dyes, Americans remain stubbornly attached to neon-bright candy and cereal. Case in point: in 2015, General Mills pledged to remove all artificial colors and flavorings from its products. The following year, it rolled out a natural version of Trix, the kid-friendly fruity breakfast cereal. But the muted Trix, colored by radishes, purple carrots and turmeric, was a flop. Customers missed the vibrant colors and complained that the new version didn't taste right. By 2017, 'classic Trix' had returned to grocery stores. On the other hand, when Kraft reformulated the powder for its macaroni and cheese and quietly began selling the all-natural version in December 2015, there was much less protest. As an Eater headline at the time put it: 'Kraft Changed Its Mac and Cheese and Nobody Noticed.' Perhaps it was the marketing strategy – Kraft did not bother to make a big announcement until after it had sold 50m boxes – or maybe it was because the natural dyes were just as orange as the original. (Alan recalls that her young nieces and nephews were slightly worried about the change but accepted the new mac and cheese without much fuss.) As the adage goes, we eat with our eyes. The appearance of food should not change our perceptions of how it tastes, but, as anyone who has ever bought produce knows, it definitely does. In nature, brighter colors indicate that foods are ripe and will taste good. This principle also applies to human-made food. As far back as the Middle Ages, according to Ai Hisano, a professor of business history at the University of Tokyo and author of Visualizing Taste: How Business Changed the Look of What You Eat, dairy farmers would mix carrot juice and annatto from achiote trees into their butter to make it a more appetizing yellow. 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(Some people already do: many ice-cream producers, including Ben & Jerry's and Häagen-Dazs, don't use green as the signifier for mint.) It seems Maha is poised to help shake America of its affair with artificial colors. But it celebrates this victory at the same time as the Trump administration guts public health infrastructure. The ice-cream industry's pledge came just 11 days after Congress passed a spending bill that will cut Medicaid spending, and therefore healthcare for millions of children, and slash Snap food assistance for US families. It came the same day that the Department of Health laid off thousands of employees. Under Trump, the government has also cut research grants to scientists studying, among other things, disease prevention and vaccines (of which Kennedy is a notorious skeptic). Underlying issues such as food and housing insecurity and child poverty that devastate children's wellbeing are likely to worsen. Alan thinks that if Kennedy is serious about improving the health of America's kids, there are much more pressing issues than food dye to work on. 'I just can't believe that someone would be given a chance to make such an impact,' she says, 'and this is what they choose to do.'
